ENGLISH INTENT STATEMENT
At Scotts, we know and understand our children. We have listened to our children’s voices, and we have created a curriculum that encourages them to become enthusiastic and engaged with English. We have worked hard to provide our children with rich and varied learning opportunities that help them to become confident and enthusiastic learners. We want our children to have a positive attitude towards communication and to be able to independently express their emotions and their ideas. Through our English Curriculum, we strive to teach the children how important their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills will be in the real world. By giving this context to their learning, the children understand the value of English to them now, and in their futures.
At Scotts we want all of our pupils to be capable readers, writers, spellers and speakers, who can transfer their English skills to other curriculum subjects and who are prepared for the next steps in their education. Our English lessons develop pupils’ spoken language, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary. English is often taught in a cross-curricular way, linking up with other areas of the curriculum. We teach our pupils to speak clearly, to convey their ideas fluently and confidently and to ask questions. We know and understand the value of excellent vocabulary and this is developed and practised across our curriculum consistently.
Reading
Our pupils are encouraged to read for pleasure and to read widely throughout all areas of their learning. We use Little Wandle for our phonics programme and we understand that phonic awareness helps with the development of reading by segmenting and blending sounds. Our children are listened to in their reading regularly, both individually and in groups/whole class situations. Our whole class guided reading sessions cover a wide variety of both fiction and non-fiction books and help to advance the children’s comprehension skills. Parents are given reading guidance and clear expectations about reading at home. We have also hosted reading workshops for parents to attend.
Phonics
Our school has chosen Little Wandle as our new systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme to teach early reading and spelling.
Please click on the link below which will take you to the parent support page for phonics information.
https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
Phase 2 sounds Autumn 1
Phase 2 and 3 Grapheme Mat
Grow the Code Grapheme Chart
Reading for Pleasure
At Scotts we strongly believe that a love of reading should be embedded from an early age. We understand that in order for children to become excellent writers they need to read and therefore we aim to engage the children with different genres of books and encourage them to read for pleasure.
Our children have access to a broad range of high quality fiction and non-fiction books in their classroom and our school libraries. We encourage our children to read high quality children’s literature whilst developing a love of reading.
We endeavour to encourage reading and hold regular workshops with our parents so that they are able to support reading for pleasure at home.
The Reading for Pleasure website has lots of ideas for supporting reading at home! https://ourfp.org/supporting-rah/
Spelling
Our school has chosen Spelling Shed as our way to teach spellings to our children and support them to consolidate and develop their skills.
Spelling Shed is a spelling scheme for years 1-6 which gives complete coverage of the National Curriculum. Teachers are able to keep track of how children are getting on with their spellings and assign them specific spellings. There is also an option where children can play games against the other children in their class.
Writing
A Poetry Party with Michael Rosen!
What a wonderful day we had joining over 10,000 children across the country for a Poetry Party hosted online by the brilliant Michael Rosen and Read for Good!
Michael Rosen entertained us all with some of his fantastic poems — many of them deliciously themed around food! One of the highlights was hearing one of our all-time favourites, “Chocolate Cake”, which had everyone laughing and joining in with big smiles. The sound of laughter and giggles filled the school — it was truly delightful to see everyone enjoying poetry together.
In preparation for the big event, we spent time writing our own poems. We even held a class swap, performing our poems for one another. There was some super poetry written and shared, showcasing so much creativity and imagination from everyone involved.
It was a joyful celebration of words, rhythm, and fun — and a reminder of how much we all love poetry!
Here is 5M's fantastic poem called 'Don't feed that to me!' The children all wrote their own versions of this poem and then collated their favourite lines to perform to Willow Class.
Year 3 wrote a version of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. Here's the last verse of their fabulous performance!
Year 2 performed their poem 'Crunch, Crunch, Crunch!' AMAZING.
Year 1A created some super autumn poems linking to their knowledge from science lessons!
Examples of work
Storytime
The Man on the Moon by Simon Bartram (read by Mrs Bones)
Ruby's Worry by Tom Percival (read by Mrs Taylor)
Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore (read by Mrs Bones)
I believe I can by Grace Byers (read by Ms Uppal)
